Presentational markup should be used to indicate how the original was marked up.
Aha! That wasn't clear to me since I've been approaching TEI as a "master" format, whereas it was really designed to describe existing texts (which is fine; that's also something I hope is part of PG's XML solution).
Instructions for how something should be displayed should be done using CSS or XSLT.
Agreed. (Though I include all transformation methods here, not just XSLT.)
I've come to respect TEI more and more as a mature body of experience which I am trusting more and more. If something seems stupid or awkward I now try to stop and step back and assume that there is a good chance I don't understand the design before trying to cobble to together my own solution.
I think that's a good approach with things like TEI, XHTML, etc. A bunch of very smart people spent quite a bit of time on them. Three caveats: 1. there are still aspects that are *truly* awkward, e.g. rend="display" to indent (though I welcome a good explanation) 2. the design goals for TEI (or any other particular solution) may not match PG's design goals 3. different people work differently, so there's often no one "best" answer (e.g. some people love XSLT, some hate it) -- Cheers, Scott S. Lawton http://Classicosm.com/ - Classic Books http://ProductArchitect.com/ - consulting